Building data centers also does create some short-term work for the trade industry. More demand for electricity would actually be a good thing too, if the need was met by building new renewable generation capacity, rather than just jacking up prices.

Basically, it's the lack of regulation that's the problem - not the data centers.

Landfills sometimes do end up contaminating the groundwater.

Also, it's absolutely possible to cool data centers without using any water at all. You'll just use more electricity. The issue mostly that the water is cheaper than the electricity.

This.

Primaries are almost always a circle jerk. Where the rubber meets road will be the general election, and I don't even have to look on Kashi/Polymarket to tell you how that's going to turn out in a +16 Trump district.

This is my preferred way of dealing with quick service food/beverage establishments. I don't want the human experience of waiting in a queue behind other customers, or having to explain my order to someone who is just going to enter it into a computer anyway.

This happened to me, too. None of the online bill pay methods worked, so I took my e-scooter to the nearest T-Mobile store and paid it. It's absolutely astonishing that they don't have their billing system check if the bill is less than their payment processing costs and to just void the last bill if that's the case.

I was on an ultra cheap grandfathered plan, but the most recent price increase pushed the bill beyond what Visible costs, so I finally jumped ship.

If you removed everything from the internet that someone else might find offensive, you'd have to remove everything, including the 404 error indicating everything has been removed, for fear of offending people with numerophobia.

The bike routes it gives are also quite bad, too. It doesn't seem to recognize bike trails and will often favor routing through roads without a bike lane, even when there are alternate roads with bike lanes available.

If it eats the lawyer, most of us will probably be fine and have a good laugh about it over a delightful plate of Chilean Sea Bass.
However, if it launches the nuclear warheads, we're fucked.

Mmm. AI generated sandwiches.

The very old school synthesized music still required traditional music composition skills. Yes, some people did try to use MOD files as a crude loop based format, but due to memory and bit sample depth constraints, the end result was usually pretty rough.

If you have any recent-ish Apple hardware kicking around, it actually includes a loop based music editor: Garage Band. My point really wasn't that this is a less legitimate way to make music, just that the end result isn't typically what we think of when we think of a music composition. You don't get traditional notation that you could hand to a band and have them play your song. You end up with an arrangement of samples, which can then be rendered by the software to a completed audio file.

That being said, people have come up with instruments that do let you play loops and samples live. It looks like this. Yeah, that still takes skill, not gonna dispute it.

IIRC, there was a real band playing the Gorillaz shows behind the curtain with the cartoon simians.

I'm really not sure how you interpreted my analogy of a hypothetical AI song being performed live into a rant against major pop artists. I was specifically saying this is just business as usual in the industry and really makes little difference whether the song originated from a loop-based editor or spat out as some AI slop. If it became popular, the path to actually earning some real profit from it (since only the top tier of artists actually earn any money from album sales) would still look very similar to how other artists perform their work live.

The vast majority of human generated art doesn't find a marketable audience either. If you've ever gone to a concert with a forgettable opening act where people would rather futz on their phones than listen to the band, you've seen it firsthand.

The irony is, if someone did have a big hit with their AI generated slop and somehow against all odds, there was demand for a live tour, they actually would need to get some human performers to put on the show.

Since we're already down this rabbit hole, it's worth mentioning that big acts like Taylor Swift already do something similar. A lot of her songs began life in loop-based music editors (which operate by mixing sampled recordings of beats, riffs, bass lines, melodies, etc., rather than traditional notation), and it's only after the fact that actual musicians do the painstaking job of remaking them, by ear, into something that can be performed by a live band with real instruments.